We don’t usually see delegates bursting with frustration in our GTD seminars but in one of my former lives it was a sign that a workshop was hitting the mark. That life involved readying business-people for international assignments and the card game ‘Barnga’ was a...

David Griffin is a senior consultant at Cambridge based 42 Technology, which offers pragmatic engineering innovation, design and development services to clients in a range of industries. He first started with GTD in 2003, when Palm Pilot devices were no longer cool...

It’s that time of year when we start thinking about Christmas. For many, it’s not all red-nosed reindeer and fairy lights, however, because Christmas is in fact one of the most stressful times of the year – mostly due to the amount of planning that...

In this episode Todd and Robert talk about how to structure the results of your thinking effectively to maximise your experience that “meaning matches location”. Click to play this episode Subscribe to the...

Given the electoral earthquake across the pond this week, the decision to develop a third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport somehow feels like it all happened ages ago. It was actually only a fortnight, but its origins do indeed go back years. The UK government’s...

“She’s gonna blow!” It is a phrase they shout in action films, just before the pressure gets too great, and whatever ‘she’ happens to be erupts in a spectacular ball of flame. Hopefully, this is not a phrase you hear shouted too often...

The genesis of genius is often in being stupid. Not the idiotic kind of stupid, but more the keeping-it-simple kind. Stupid enough to just do the not-terribly-exciting stuff consistently, to create the conditions in which great results can show up. One example of this...

Gundula Welti is a certified GTD Trainer and has 21 years of experience in both buying and sales roles within a large international corporation. She is highly specialised in sales and negotiations and uses GTD in all aspects of her life. She says that GTD helped her...

In our increasingly always-on, too-much-to-do, pay-attention-to-me-now world, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that stress in the workplace is on the up, but in a recent study we have some hard data to ponder. Stress was at the top of the list of health and...

In ‘The Land of the Rising Sun’ during the 1990s, the madogiwazoku – which is Japanese for ‘the window tribe’ – were ageing employees who were no longer seen as useful to the organisation. However, since there was a reluctance in Japan’s corporate culture...

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” -Robert Burns, “To a Mouse” It happens about once per seminar. During the practice session, where people are clarifying their project outcomes and next actions, a hand goes...

I bumped into a former GTD participant earlier this week, and I could see from her body language that she wasn’t keen to see me. Initial pleasantries past, I found out why. “I’m off the wagon”, she said, sheepishly. “That’s great!” I countered. This did not seem to...

It came to me, as many of my moments of inspiration do, when I was doing something completely unrelated. I was enjoying a beautiful walk in the hills with my wife last weekend, and it occurred to me: “we all have lots of things we need to do, our ‘open...

In this episode Todd and Robert talk about the first and one of the most fundamental steps in the GTD process: capturing what has your attention effectively, often, and well. Click to play this episode Subscribe to the...

As he lay dying by the railway tracks the local MP for Liverpool, the Right Honourable William Huskisson, must have thought… “Dash it all… I didn’t see that coming!” On this very day in 1830, a train service was launched connecting Manchester, the greatest...

“I’ll get right on it, boss,” the new recruit beams back at me. There’s just one problem – he doesn’t write it down. When I mention this, his face falls, as if to say, “Don’t you trust me?” Still, I am not too...

A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming Tuesday was my first day back after a couple of weeks of stay-cating here in London. Doing London-y things, some of which I’ve been meaning to do since arriving 21 years ago. It was a delicious...

Earlier in the month I took a week off, as I do every year, to join a group of about 80 musicians who gather to play jazz music in the hills of Surrey here in England. It’s an intense week, about 14 hours a day for seven days, filled with rehearsals, workshops,...

It’s a sun-filled summer afternoon and you’re strolling happily down the street when a flash of light catches your eye from pavement ahead. You instinctively tell yourself it’s probably just shiny litter but your eyes linger, widen and then sparkle with delight. Yes,...

As a teenager, I used to play competitive chess. One of the most exciting spectacles in this world is the exhibition match, where a single player would compete against numerous other players simultaneously. I got to participate in one such match against a Russian...

Ben Saunders is one of the world’s leading polar explorers, and a record-breaking long-distance skier who has covered more than 6,000km (3,700 miles) on foot in the Polar Regions since 2001. Ben is the third person in history to ski solo to the North Pole, and holds...

For the past seven years we’ve been out doing this GTD thing for clients large and small, and we’ve been getting consistently great feedback on how it is positively impacting the lives of those who use it. As people who have made it our job to spread these...

My knuckles tightened spasmodically on the steering wheel as I sat in traffic watching the minutes tick by on the dashboard clock. I had 30 minutes to make my meeting in a hotel across town and I was stuck in a rush hour jam on the Manchester inner ring road, in a...